Not science, but not claiming to be: My first reviews in French

I just got the reviews of my first conference paper submission in French. (I wish I could say that I dared to write it in French, but no: one of my co-authors, a native speaker, translated it from English, with, of course, many additional contributions.) The reviews illustrate a couple of interesting grammatical points, and of course, thanks to Zipf’s Law, they bring up some new vocabulary items.

The interesting grammatical item: the definite article in L’article, qui n’est pas en soi une contribution scientifique (mais ne prétend pas l‘être)… “The article, which is not itself a scientific contribution (but does not claim to be)…” I’m not sure what that epenthetic article is called, but I’ve heard this type of construction before, most notably in an episode of Coffee Break French, Season 4, where it was talked about at some length. There’s clearly no English equivalent, but it is required in French, as far as I know.